Pop singer-songwriter Julia Michaels‘ long-awaited follow-up to her 2017 EP Nervous System is finally here. Michaels visited Zane Lowe’s World Record today to premiere the new EP’s lead track, a collaboration with Selena Gomez called “Anxiety.”
In addition to her pop singing career, Michaels is a prolific songwriter. Her writing for Selena Gomez’s 2015 record Revival and Justin Bieber’s Purpose helped shape the sound and trends of contemporary pop for years afterward. Michaels is a fantastic songwriter with a killer voice, and it’s great to finally have her and her fresh, honest pop back.
“Anxiety” is a confessional empowerment anthem, but not in the way you might think. Michaels shared some context on the song and her process writing it on Lowe’s show:
“I kind of want to talk about these sort of things that I deal with on a daily basis. Not just anxiety but the fear of missing out and sort of wanting to do things but never actually like having the ability to go through with anything that you want to do. […] And I was like, I think it’d be really awesome to have a song with two women on it that struggle with the same thing, that are talking about something other than two women fighting for a guy’s attention. Or something like that. It’s almost like a female empowerment song without it being a female empowerment song. It’s us saying, ‘Hey, we have anxiety and we’re okay with it.'”
Along with “Anxiety,” Michaels’ new EP Inner Monologue Part I features five other new songs, including a collaboration with One Direction’s Niall Horan, with whom she toured last year. Listen to Inner Monologue Part I below.
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